Rahul Bhattacharya: Railsong, Gebunden

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'Magnificent' KAMILA SHAMSIE
'Majestic yet profoundly tender' MEGHA MAJUMDAR

A breathtaking novel about a woman forging a life for herself on the railways, Railsongis the story of an individual coming of age amid the religious and political upheavals of twentieth-century India.

In a newly independent India incandescent with national vigour, Charu, the motherless daughter of a railway worker, pines for freedom from the shackles of her impoverishment and meagre prospects in her town. She flees the claustrophobic domesticity of her childhood for the alluring modernity, and apparent opportunities, of Bombay. As India moves from steam to diesel locomotives, through drought and famine, a great strike and state repression, Charu dares to imagine and demand a different future for herself.

Unfazed by the everyday discriminations around her, she becomes an unlikely hero: a railway woman and census enumerator who keeps her heart open -sometimes guilelessly - to her nation's vast possibility. Sweeping, elegiac and at times wonderfully comic, Railsong is a powerful portrait of grit, optimism and the force of character that enables one remarkable woman to thrive in a country full of contradictions.